Driving or riding down any Kyiv city street today, you have no trouble realizing that the pre-independence auto census of about 150,000 has now grown to upwards of one million. In fact, there are times when you're sitting at some gridlocked corner or square with nothing but cars, trucks, buses and marshrutkas as far as the eye can see that you could easily believe that most of this huge number of vehicles is converging on your location.
Ukraine's relative affluence in recent years has led not only to expansion of public transport but much wider ownership of private vehicles. In fact, for the growing legions of young professionals, the evidence of financial and social success is usually measured by the ability to purchase an automobile. With seven year financing readily available, auto purchase has now become easier than ever.
Auto driving is neither a privilege nor a right any more than riding in an elevator is. It is a lifestyle. Depending on where you live, it may be mandatory. Work and the need to access the basic necessities of life dictate where we must go. How we get there depends on large-scale construction and engineering projects and very large amounts of public money. How we get there depends on whose needs get met first.
The lure of the open road notwithstanding, any urban population can only use a mode of transportation that has been provided to them and designated for their use. There is very little spontaneity in urban planning and when there is it is probably a bad thing.
Stalin's lieutenant Lazar Kaganovich directed the construction of the first Moscow metro in the 1930's relying on forced labor to build the Sokolnicheskaya line. In the words of Soviet propaganda the "palaces of the people" i.e. metro stations, were destined to be "a majestic school in the formation of man."
Kaganovich is also famous for his part in the All-Ukrainian Party Conference of 1930 which endorsed the policies of collectivization that many historians argue led to the catastrophic 1932-33 Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) in which millions of Ukrainians died.
In the early 1990s, six cars at an intersection in the center of Kyiv constituted a traffic jam. Meanwhile the public transportation systems had been systematically enlarged and operated with unrivalled reliability.
Today - 16 years after independence - Kyiv's main streets are very heavily congested with slow-moving traffic, and city planners are struggling to cope with the continuous increase in the number of vehicles of all kinds.
During rush hours, Kyiv's main thoroughfares see bumper-to-bumper traffic, with gridlock common at many intersections. Drivers complain that it often takes them twice as long to reach a destination at the other end of the city as it does for Kyivans using public transportation.
The city subsidizes passenger transportation, which keeps it cheap for everybody to use but also makes it hard to find money to fix the roads and bridges. The more decrepit the infrastructure becomes the more costly to fix and the greater the risk of paralyzing traffic disruptions.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that not only is there not enough money for adequate road maintenance, the sidewalks, which were never designed to handle heavy cars and trucks to begin with, are suffering much greater wear and tear and in need of more frequent and costly repair.
If you are sitting behind the wheel of a car or you are sitting behind someone else sitting behind the wheel of a bus you are still in a metal box going 30-40 kilometers per hour - or much less - bouncing up and down crooked and decaying roads. It's hard to understand why more people don't pay the 50 kopecks Metro or city bus fare or the average UAH 1.25 marshrutka fare to have someone else deal with the aggravation for them.
Soviet style metro design was not the greatest of human endeavors but it was still a significant achievement. Its enduring advantages are that it is environmentally friendly, it's safe, and it gives long- range mobility to segments of the population that wouldn't otherwise have it. That includes not only people who can't afford a car but visitors and expat residents.
The subway lines are certainly simpler to understand than bus routes. The Metro has a large centralized administration and many employees that make it particularly suited to stabilize employment levels as part of Keynesian economic strategy.
Shifting public investment from a dilapidated yet still quite robust public transportation system to the construction of underground parking garages and cloverleaf interchanges is less a question of civil engineering than social engineering. Raising fares or curtailing service is an awkward and divisive proposition to present to the public.
The contradiction between the practical requirements of an impoverished nation's basic need for transport and consumer demand for the prestige and novelty of private car ownership will take a long time for Ukrainians to resolve. The traffic jams can't be made to go away quickly.
The population of Kyiv has remained at about 2.6 million, but the number of cars has mushroomed, according to Kyiv's City Transportation Bureau, which has watched the numbers grow each year.
The number of vehicles registered in Kyiv has mushroomed since 1991, according to information compiled by the city administration. At the end of 1990, city residents had registered about 150,000 cars. A decade later, that number had risen to more than 500,000, with an estimated 800,000 cars on the roads today.
Prior to 1990, city's vehicular population grew at no more than 5,000 per year. Since then, however, the numbers have grown each year, with annual growth rising to 25,000 vehicles a year by 1998. With the amount of liquidity sloshing around in the Ukrainian economy and easily available seven-year finance plans, the vehicle census appears certain to escalate.
In case you find some fault with the city's vehicle census figures, you have to keep in mind that vehicles belonging to embassies, foreign companies and even some local companies are not included in the city's official tally. The logic behind that policy is too obscure to even consider here.
The burgeoning auto population has created headaches for Kyiv City Administration officials, with cars far outnumbering available places to park them. The city is mulling plans this year to build some 26 parking garages and has made parking lots a requirement for new residential construction projects.
Deputy Head of Kyiv City Administration Denis Bass said on April 26 that there are plans to build underground parking in the central part of the city. Parking space will also be added close to transportation hubs and alongside the big highways. There are now about 230,000 parking spaces available; new construction will raise this number to 350,000.
Underground parking complexes are being built under Mykhaylivska square and Poshtova square and also along Volodymyrska, Triokhsviatytelska, Hlybochnytska and Bohdana Khmelnytskoho streets, Bass said. Another is being built at Kudryavsky Uzviz. Shevchenko, Lesi Ukrainky, Druzhby Narodiv and Perova boulevards are other places where the city is considering underground parking projects.
"Right now we are getting the documentation together to put these projects on the investment market," said Bass, noting that it could also be possible to make modern parking facilities out of the old local cooperative garages. Land availability will determine whether new parking garages are built above ground or underground, Bass added.
The nation's legislature years ago acknowledged the parking problem and in 2002 amended the nation's traffic code to make parking on sidewalks permissible under many circumstances.
The streets and sidewalks brimming full with cars have now been further aggravated by Kyiv's downtown construction boom. Construction projects have forced the closure of major roads, temporarily diverting greater numbers of automobiles, trucks and buses onto narrower streets. Portions of several major thoroughfares in the city center, including Saksohanskoho and Zhylyanska streets, will be closed this summer as the city undertakes massive construction projects.
Vasyl Melnychenko, chief engineer for Kyivavtodor, the city agency responsible for road repair and transportation works, said the work is a necessary part of a developing city and presents only
a temporary inconvenience. What Melnychenko views as a "temporary inconvenience" may be viewed in a much different light by the tens of thousands of people who will have their travel disrupted and delayed for several months?
Melnychenko went on to say that his agency seeks long-term solutions for easing the city's growing traffic load. The Kyiv City Administration in 2002 approved a 20-year plan developed by Melnychenko's agency. The program includes construction of new roads in
the capital, redesigning intersections to allow more traffic and building additional bridges to connect the city's left bank with the center.
"Our general plan has been expanded to assess the impacts on the road network until 2020," Melnychenko said. "It's based on projected traffic growth, the effects of future traffic changes, and the development plans of Kyiv's 10 districts."
There are about 1,600 kilometers of public roads in Kyiv, 11 radial highways, and 2 ring and 2 semi-ring roads. Lighting up all this road space requires 130 thousand streetlights.
The subway has 44 stations, 56 kilometers of track and 617 subway cars in use on three main Metro lines. Kyiv's Metro carried 558 million passengers in 2004 and 598 million in 2005. The national government doesn't pay for the subway; the city administration bears all expenses and must raise the money necessary for expansion.
Public bus transportation runs on 134 bus routes. In addition, there are 317 marshrutka operated by private companies. In addition, there are 23 tram routes and 40 trolleybus routes. These routes are serviced by 1,306 buses, 528 trolleybuses, 533 tramcars and four funicular tramcars. Trams carried some 190 million passengers annually, trolleybuses 286 million, and buses 320 million.
Kyiv spent UAH 363 million on the subway system in 2006 and opened a new subway station, Vyrlytsa. The budget this year is some UAH 860 million, with UAH 1.5 billion earmarked for 2008, when work on three new subway stations (Demiyivska, Holosiyivska, and Vasylkivska) is expected to be completed.
The city's plan is graphically represented via a huge wall map at Kyivproekt,
the city design bureau. The color-coded map shows the status of work planned for the city's streets, major intersections and bridges.
As far back as 1966, traffic planners wanted seven bridges across the Dnipro, but they only built four. Two new bridges spanning the Dnipro, the Podil and Darnytsky, are presently under construction. Not long after they are finished, the older bridges, Moskovsky and Paton, will need to be closed and reconstructed. Moskovsky Most was planned to carry 60,000 autos a day, but it actually carries double that today. The new bridges should help to shift industry from the right to the left bank and clear trucking traffic from the center of the city.
Less urgent projects include construction of new access roads linking highways from Kyiv to Vinnytsia and Odesa oblasts.
Melnychenko said that in 2007 his agency would spend some UAH 130 million on road, bridge and tunnel repairs. He said private investors would contribute to the total amount in exchange for commercial rights to underground malls, shops and other venues. That equals some 648 thousand square meters on 70 streets.
"We see the problems, we know how to solve them and we will solve them if the necessary financial resources are made available," he said, noting that that many roads will be renovated completely - not just have some potholes filled in.
|
